


Inheritance, and Absconding with It

by beswathe



Category: Demento | Haunting Ground
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Firmly In The 'Daniella is a Homunculus' Camp, Post-Game, Pre-Femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-10-10 07:45:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17421800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beswathe/pseuds/beswathe
Summary: Fiona and Hewie embark on their first night outside Belli Castle. The family maid goes with them.





	Inheritance, and Absconding with It

Once Fiona emerged from the thicket of trees standing guard around Belli Castle and had the asphalt of a highway beneath her boots, she felt overwhelmingly compelled to fall to her knees.

She’d done a lot of that lately (her skin boasted the bruises to prove it), but this time, it wasn’t from fright or injury. After fleeing a grotesque museum of twistedly spiritual things, prostrating herself before some unseen god was the last thing she should have _wanted_ to do... and yet she could only credit her survival, against all odds and common sense, to divine intervention. There was no other explanation for it.

Or maybe she could apportion some of the thanks to Hewie. The foliage rustled, and then he was there, nudging her trembling arms with his once-white head that had blackened in patches with dust. Probably due to debris from the collapse of the tower. She didn’t want to think of what else it might be.

As she regrouped, she considered her surroundings—fresh air, jagged gravel under her palms, the sound of her own shallow breaths after she’d grown used to hearing only her own heartbeat in her ears—yet felt mostly conscious of what wasn’t there. Namely, cars. No engines in the distance or horns commanding her to get out of the road.

Nobody had been waiting for her, nor gearing up to save her.

Her parents were really dead, then.

Fiona had suspected it from the moment she’d woken beneath a white sheet, like a corpse lacking the decency to know it was dead. With the Castle so busy trying to help her accept her mortality, she hadn’t exactly been able to grieve, and she still couldn’t. This ordeal would not be over until she was far away from here.

The thicket rustled for a third time behind her, and she looked over her shoulder with a sense of resignation, too exhausted for anything more. Perhaps the gardener had changed his mind and followed her. If nothing else, this place had demonstrated an ability to surprise her whenever she risked growing complacent, and it didn’t disappoint now—because with her apron bloodied and hands mercifully empty, there emerged the maid.

The _dead_ maid. The one Fiona had _watched_ die, ripped in two then skewered on the spot, akin to a butterfly pinned and staged for display. Another entry for the museum.

But she was not dead, or at least, as close to being not-dead as was possible for something like her. Her shirt wasn’t just smeared with blood, but soaked, positively saturated. It was a testament to how numb Fiona had become that she hardly batted an eyelash, instead finding herself thankful that it obscured the ghastly wound beneath.

Hewie snarled, tail and hackles raised, while Fiona got to her feet. She shushed him gently, under her breath and with a warning touch between his ears. Though he obeyed, he looked up at her, as if to question whether she’d traded her mind for the key to the gates; perhaps she had.

Yet she could still feel everything. The gravel, and also the soft, dewy green of the grass on the other side of the road that she hadn’t touched. She felt the breeze not simply against her skin, but passing through her, between the spaces separating each atom—accompanied by sunlight, noble gases, the essence of this world and others.

She was alive, more aware of it than she’d ever been. And after that, she was _tired_.

“You’re not going to hurt me,” Fiona said. Her intention wasn’t to give life to a self-fulfilling prophecy, to wish something impossible into existence. It was a statement of fact, and she knew it because she could _feel_ the truth of it.

The maid said nothing. But she didn’t do anything either, and Fiona supposed that was as good as she was going to get. 

* * *

In the light of what was likely noon, the maid looked even more ghostly-pale than she had indoors. She carried herself with the posture of a statue, gaze still devoid of a spark. She was a creature that had scarcely belonged in the castle, and she certainly wouldn’t be able to pass as a regular hitchhiker. Not with the state of her clothes.

So it was fortunate they hadn’t encountered a car on the open road yet, instead walking undisturbed down the middle. Fiona led with Hewie beside her, and the maid followed ten paces or so behind.

Though Fiona wasn’t sure if they were heading towards civilisation or away from it, every step that distanced her from her extended family (the bones of them, anyway) could only be good. If her parents had chosen to holiday in the Tuscany countryside because they’d hoped for some kind of reunion—well. That implied things she’d rather not consider.

It was better to focus on the most immediate problems at hand, and those were the following:

She couldn’t speak Italian. She didn’t have a vehicle. She didn’t have any money.

A rumble on the horizon told her she’d be able to add another problem to her list very soon, though in truth, she’d felt the car before she’d even heard it. She’d sensed out the people inside: one person, to be exact. She’d sensed the shape of a portly, middle-aged man, without picturing any of his features, both obscured and defined by a depth of water.

Fiona moved to the side of the road in advance, Hewie close behind, but the maid stopped where she was; she’d apparently been tracking a straight line, right down the white paint that divided lanes. Fiona opened her mouth to call to her, then remembered she didn’t actually know the maid’s name. If she even had one.

All in all, Fiona had not been missing much when she’d struggled to visualise the driver. He was somehow reminiscent of every middle-aged man she’d ever met—both like her father and nothing like him—and as his sedan rolled to a stop, his expression contorted with vicious displeasure, all-too-familiar. He came out red-faced and furious, shouting at the maid with her back to him; now he looked more like Riccardo.

More so than death (death she’d witnessed, then caused), Fiona was tired of angry men, of the brutality in them. She thought that maybe she wasn’t the only one, because Hewie snarled, meeting every foreign word the stranger uttered with a change in octave. Or so it seemed. Fiona realised when the maid turned around that, of her and the driver, Hewie wasn’t growling at him.

He was growling at her.

The maid advanced on the angry, bellowing man, who fell silent when he saw her apron. She lunged, predator-fast, and clamped her red fingers around his neck. They squeezed and his eyes bulged obscenely, then rolled back in his head, the bobbing lump in his throat compressed beneath her hands. His arms flailed but didn’t get far.

Fiona watched, entirely aware of what she was about to see, every fraction of a movement delineated—but she didn’t look away as the maid snapped the man’s neck.

Then she dropped him to the ground like she was discarding litter. Medical waste. Though Fiona could see the body, she could no longer sense him on whatever plane had revealed itself to her, and just like that he was gone. Irrelevant.

The roots of her family tree thirsted for this and now they could feed.

“Why?” Fiona said. She barely wanted to ask; her voice quivered. “Why... did you do that?”

Again the maid said nothing. She didn’t spare Fiona a glance, nor seem remotely interested in admiring her handiwork. Instead, she was looking straight ahead, at the newly-vacant car with its rumbling engine still turning over.

A method to the madness. To kill for the convenience of it.

Fiona had a vehicle, now. 

* * *

What she lacked was a license, but she reckoned the classes she’d been taking back in England would be more than adequate for navigating a deserted stretch. If her trembling hands caused the car to veer this way and that, there was hardly a police presence to stop her, and the maid wasn’t complaining. Her continued stillness was unnerving, but it was preferable to mania. There was at least no risk of her being a backseat driver.

Hewie had claimed the passenger side before Fiona had even considered seating arrangements. He’d leapt onto the chair and curled up. It was only natural he’d be worn out, too.

Despite the mild weather, the man had been driving with his window down; Fiona disliked the breeze but found herself unable to roll it back up again. That would feel too much like accepting the car as ill-gotten property rather than a temporary loan. Not that he would be coming back to claim it any time soon.

So when she spoke to the stoneface staring at her from the backseat, it was in search of a distraction—either from the chill, or the tedium of the winding roads, flanked by green blotches of fields and rows of pinstripe-trees she’d never seen anywhere else.

“Can you tell me where we are?”

If the maid could, she was in no mood to do so.

“Was the castle built here on purpose? Or do people avoid it because of the castle?”

No answer, though Fiona inferred the truth involved a little of both. Everything new that had begun flooding her senses, the fundamental math of the world, all came back to the castle. Tendrils stretched from it, some corporeal and some not, connecting her to everything, and everything to her ancestral home. It felt deceptively inviting, an aura that probably had a very different effect on people who lacked sufficient azoth for attracting its trickery.

The car crested over a hill to find only more winding road ahead, and Fiona tried one last time.

“Do you have a name?”

A lull followed, so protracted that Fiona came to accept she wouldn’t be getting a response.

“Daniella,” the maid said. 

* * *

In the end, they had fewer hours of daylight left than Fiona had been counting on. By dusk they had only found fleeting signs of life, in the shape of a few small houses. They lined up strangely along the road, as though a deity above had scattered seeds and homes sprouted where they fell. All painted white, near-glowing in the dark.

Night had fallen when they stumbled upon somewhere to stay. It was a modest, stucco country house that had been converted into an inn—something Fiona gathered from the swinging sign outside boasting the hand-painted word HOTEL. (Whatever was happening to her, she still didn’t speak Italian.)

She did, however, find money. In the glove compartment lay a stack of Euros, and as guilty as she’d felt for snooping to begin with, she felt guiltier still upon taking it for herself. Not guilty enough to refrain from spending it, mind.

But she was tired. So was Hewie.

There was a beaten leather jacket on the back seat of the car, missing a button or two. Daniella refused to wear it—rather, she didn’t react at all to Fiona’s request for her to put it on—but she did carry it, draped over her folded arms. It concealed most of the blood; it did little for the smell.

Despite the late hour, they found one half of an elderly couple manning the front desk of a lobby that was either cramped or cosy. The old woman was sweet, and mercifully receptive to Hewie, and with kind eyes she spoke a broken English that left Fiona slightly humbled. She anticipated questions, either about the bruises that littered her body or the iron in the air. But when she laid a handful of banknotes on the desk, the innkeeper had little else to say.

They ascended the stairs, Fiona’s fist tight around yet another key, and the steps creaked and groaned under her modest weight. Hewie’s claws skittered against the wood. But Daniella seemed to glide along them, soundless and intangible, a phantom. Maybe that’s exactly what she was; she was dead, after all. Fiona had killed her.

The furniture in their room was cushioned with outdated paisley designs: so normal in its gaudiness, such a far cry from oppressive gothic architecture, that Fiona could’ve wept with relief. As every other room had been taken, they’d received one bed, but she knew Daniella did not sleep. She couldn’t recall if that was because Daniella herself had mentioned it, back when she’d listed all the things she did not need, or because there were many things Fiona knew today that she hadn’t previously.

Hewie must’ve been hungry, but dogs as a species hid their pain; this was knowledge Fiona had already possessed. He patted down a circle on the fur rug beside the iron bed, and once he was content with his work, all but crumpled to the floor. Fiona envied him. At least in sleep, he wouldn’t suffer.

She feared sleep would not come so easily for her. 

* * *

By lamplight, and the anemic moonlight pervading the window, Fiona finally cried.

She tried making herself small atop the pillows, pushed up against the bars with her head buried in her knees, as though this space wasn’t really hers to inhabit. She cried without noise, as quiet as Daniella had been, continued to be. She was sick of using her voice for unpleasant things.

Relief was indeed her catalyst for the most part, but now she was coming to understand the meaning of survivor’s guilt, and not due to the trickling, ephemeral data pushing against the boundaries of her awareness. Her parents were dead, which they’d perhaps brought on themselves in their haste to _sacrifice_ her... but they were still her parents. She was alone in a foreign land, yet she was alone with herself, too. Foreign to herself.

Before this, she’d thought her greatest problem was her inability to appreciate postmodern art. But she’d discovered she came from something horrible and steeped in ritual, and maybe she wasn’t really human either.

Still, she wasn’t naive (no longer had an excuse to be); where gut instinct said to trust that Daniella wouldn’t hurt her, it said nothing about trusting _Daniella_. The maid’s eyes were on her the whole time, unyielding but not expectant. Daniella stood near the doorway and simply watched, hands clasped neatly in front of her, where her body boasted that gaping wound hidden only by the fabric clinging to it.

Killing for the sake of convenience. Killing for the sake of _dominion_. When Fiona hadn’t managed to tame the residents of Belli Castle, she’d killed them; when killing them hadn’t worked, they’d nonetheless been domesticated. The groundskeeper even bowed to her. Maybe this was Daniella doing the same.

Turning her head, trying to blink back tears eclipsing her vision, Fiona looked at the maid. Daniella reciprocated, tilting her head slowly and slightly in a way that made Fiona nervous.

“Why did you come with us?” Fiona said, wearily.

Hearing Daniella’s voice was nerve-wracking too.

“I could not stay there.”

“Why not? The groundskeeper did.”

“He is... an oversight. He is expendable.”

Fiona didn’t fancy asking what that meant. “I don’t care about him. I want to know about you. Have you ever left the castle before?”

“No,” Daniella said. And then she added, as though entirely oblivious to the gravity of what she had done by even coming here, “I am without purpose.”

“Because I,” Fiona began.

She trailed off, shying from the prospect of uttering it aloud. Daniella didn’t share her reservations.

“You killed Master Riccardo,” Daniella said, stating fact instead of accusation, “and Master Lorenzo. My sole purpose is to serve.”

“Do you think I’m your master now?” Fiona asked, something she’d been considering since Daniella first followed her outside, into the real world, where alchemists didn't create their own servants or live in decaying castles or even exist.

She nearly jumped, startled, when Daniella narrowed her eyes, just a fraction but enough to be noticeable. The maid held contempt there, more emotion than she’d spared all day, even when she’d murdered a man with hands designed for menial chores.

Daniella did not like the idea of serving Fiona, then. She didn’t seem to like Fiona much, so it was no revelation. When she spoke, it was in a low register that was either apathetic or resentful.

“There is nowhere else I can go.” 

* * *

If they were going to go _anywhere_ come the morning, they would need to be slightly less conspicuous in their appearance. Little could be done about the way Daniella looked, but her unnatural hair was the least of their worries when what she sorely lacked was a change of clothes.

When Fiona grew tired of crying, she rose from the bed and moved to the en suite door, which force of habit made her open slowly. She peered around it just as tentatively, only to find an unremarkable bathroom with no eldritch horror waiting for her. On the cramped-or-cosy scale, it leaned towards the former.

The idea of entering such a confined space with Daniella was disquieting, but Fiona reasoned that Hewie was not far away, and leaving the door open provided the illusion of having somewhere to run. So she asked, politely, for Daniella to follow her, and after a moment of almost curious staring, Daniella did.

There was a bath with brass taps, overlooked by an incongruous plastic showerhead. A footstool occupied the little space remaining between the sink and the bath, and Fiona sat there, rendered surprised when Daniella perched on the edge of the bath without prompting. Fiona got the impression this was not the first time someone had tended to Daniella’s wounds this way. It didn’t bear thinking about.

Fiona gripped the sole towel that had been left out by the innkeepers, twisting around to wet it in the sink. The ‘hot’ tap doused it in lukewarm water.

Up close, under harsh fluorescent lighting, Fiona could see the concave gash through Daniella’s chest, a slit-like hollow that almost ran in a perfectly straight line from her thorax to her abdomen. What Fiona lacked in first aid training (especially aid for the dead) she made up for with vague hope that cleaning the wound might help, if only superficially. It'd involve Daniella exposing it.

Fiona supposed she was meant to feel embarrassed about that. Under any other circumstances, she may well have been. After the obscene things Riccardo had said to her, or Riccardo and Lorenzo placing their perversions upon her, she was fresh out of shame.

In a bid to spare the maid the same indignity, she didn’t try to undress Daniella, but found herself feeling uncomfortable anyway. Like a voyeur, both to Daniella’s body and the lethal injury Fiona herself had marked it with. And it didn’t help that Daniella moved so slowly, either by nature… or due to this being part of her routine, too. She was accustomed to being watched by the person who’d hurt her.

After discarding her jacket, Daniella peeled down her apron—because that was the only way to describe it; her own blood had pasted it against her skin, resistant to removal. The green shirt underneath yielded to a similar effort, and then she was naked from the waist up, save for the choker around her neck. Really, Fiona suspected it’d been intended to serve as more of a collar.

Daniella was so, so pale, diaphanous beneath the light. Her neck was long, and her breasts looked soft and full, remarkable in their normalcy. Like the rest of her, her skin was tinted a sickly lilac, but faintly. Bloodsplatter from her impalement resembled red paint splashed liberally over a canvas. It had all been shed from the dead-centre of a cobweb, each thread a sinuous blue vein.

Fiona was fascinated, sensitive to the fact she was staring but unable to stop. The most intriguing part was the wound itself. Daniella’s chest had certainly caved in at some point because there was a dip between her breasts, but the grisly laceration Fiona had been dreading wasn’t there. Instead, there was a valley down her middle, a parting, closer to sunken pink scar tissue than a fresh cut. It put the mystery of Daniella’s endurance to rest.

Tepid water seeped from the towel Fiona was holding, spilled through her fingers to flow down her hands, wrists, beneath the cuffs of her shirt. She draped it across the side of the bath for a moment, next to Daniella, as she ultimately reached out to touch her—to remove the choker from around her neck. It would not get in the way of cleaning up, but it was a cruel reminder of Riccardo’s captivity.

Fiona had spent so much time trying to keep away from Daniella that willingly getting this close should have gone against every impulse she had. There were no alarms in her head, no heart palpitations. Daniella wasn’t warm to the touch, but she wasn’t cold, either. Like the water from the tap.

While her arms circled Daniella’s neck to fumble for the choker’s clasp, her breath scaled Daniella’s shoulder. To her surprise, Daniella leant her head away, as though welcoming the heat across her skin. Or maybe she was trying to make the removal easier. Whatever it was, Fiona found it odd. She felt something shift in her outer perception, and suddenly Daniella was not a blip on her radar at all—not as a dormant peril, anyway. Maybe just for now.

Once she was done, she exchanged the choker for the towel and, as gently as she could, pressed it against Daniella’s chest. She dabbed the wound, or its aftermath, as though she was mixing paint, watching as the blood turned to watery, pinkish rivulets that coursed lines over Daniella’s skin. They looked like tear tracks. Fiona washed those off, too, careful not to apply too much pressure, though she suspected Daniella wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between softness and savagery anyway.

Daniella was docile and passive, for the most part. She still watched Fiona keenly until it was over, speaking only after Fiona withdrew.

“Should I do the same for you, Miss?” she said, and Fiona nearly reeled.

She was admittedly in bad shape, grazed and purple in places, but she was less filthy than she was drained. A combination of Hewie and strategising had seen to that. She would want a shower in the morning, probably, to soothe the less visible aches.

The prospect of Daniella’s languid hands on her, tending to her, made her feel skittish with an apprehension she couldn’t define. Those were hands that had tried to kill her, and had already killed a stranger before her very eyes. Peril or not, Fiona didn’t think she’d ever need a maid.

Anyway, the white towel was already stained beyond salvaging. Fiona imagined it would be added to the bill. 

* * *

It became clear that Daniella had no intention of wearing her skewered garments again when she followed Fiona out of the bathroom and left them inside. With no replacements available, Fiona supposed she’d just have to accept it. When an immolated skeleton had been chasing her, raiding wardrobes hadn’t seemed like a priority.

She was too tired to think of a solution.

She was too tired, full stop.

Hewie had not stirred, and the thin cloud cover tonight was nonetheless effective in dimming the moon. Fiona made her way to the bed, managed to wrangle off her boots, then decided she had no energy left for further action.

The duvet was uneven when she slumped on top, and beneath that, the mattress was lumpy. It still felt like the most inviting bed to ever grace Fiona's path.

But she couldn’t close her eyes, not yet. Daniella had resumed standing by the door, either to keep watch or because she didn’t know what else to do. It hadn’t slipped Fiona’s mind that the last time she’d tried to sleep under Daniella’s supervision, she’d been poisoned and almost speared.

“Are you going to try to kill me again?” she asked, voice muffled from where half her mouth was pressed into the pillow.

Daniella slowly looked at her through the dark. “No.”

“I don’t know if I can believe you.” Everything wanted her dead, it seemed. She wouldn’t be surprised if the nice old hotelier gave it a shot.

“It would do me no good,” Daniella said. It was somehow more reassuring to get a self-serving answer rather than any earnest declaration of peace.

“What do you mean?”

“Your azoth,” Daniella said (and there was that word again, the word that suddenly meant everything), “is worthless to me. My master used equipment to extract it… At times, I watched him work. If I had failed, he would have known… what to do with you.”

Fiona smiled weakly, against her better judgement. She didn’t really feel all that amused, but it suited her luck. Daniella was only disinterested in killing her because she couldn’t perform the parlor tricks required to make Fiona’s corpse an item of utility and not mere decoration.

Perhaps when she woke up, she’d be in the back seat of her father’s car, still on their way to whatever luxury resort her mother selected.

“Are you going to stand there all night?”

No reply. Eyes in the dark.

“I don’t want you to.”

“Then where would you have me go, Miss?”

Fiona pondered the answer to that herself. She wanted no part of whatever had sustained her family for centuries, all their wickedness and the inhumanity that came with trying to stay human forever. Daniella had terrified her, threatened her without empathy or compassion, but was it any wonder she’d come to be that way after prolonged exposure to the Belli line? She had learnt from the worst.

No more. There would be no more, not from Daniella or even Hewie. Daniella stood at the precipice of being an obstacle or being collateral damage, just like Fiona. Whatever she was, she’d behaved herself tonight. If any good had come of this baptism of fire, it was Fiona’s awakening to the fact she had something to salvage from her birthright, the secret to how she’d survived, and that was this: she had inherited life.

Azoth. Power, but hers was so much more potent. Hers would be enough for two.

“Come here,” Fiona finally said.

She wouldn’t deem Daniella’s pause to be a hesitation, because nothing seemed to faze Daniella. The maid just reacted like that, orders reaching her through thick treacle, weighed up and processed.

Daniella sailed across the floor like a shadow, though she must’ve been real because the mattress dipped slightly when she sat upon it. She watched Fiona, peering down over her shoulder, before moving to lie down, as if copying the pose she’d seen.

Because Daniella did not need sleep. Daniella did not need many things.

Fiona met her eye, face half-illuminated by the moon. Every photon mingled with every particle that made up Fiona, and Daniella, and the dog gently snoring on the floor. Daniella breathed like a person would; Fiona only realised this about her now, Daniella’s outer curve rising with a breath, falling on the exhale.

“I’m all you’ve got now,” Fiona murmured. “I’m the last Belli left.”

“I know,” Daniella said. Her lips seemed to glow white, as did the tips of her hair, the edges of her skin. She was beautiful and bleak.

“You won’t have to hurt anymore, nor hurt anyone else.”

If Daniella was capable of amusement, even from a place of sadistic pleasure, she seemed to put whatever aptitude she had to work now. Her mouth moved, perhaps a smile. Too ambiguous to be sure.

“Why is that, Miss?”

“Because my power is the power that made you. I understand it now. Or… I will.” Fiona couldn’t tell if she sounded convincing, but she meant it. “And it’s telling me that I can trust you.”

Now, when Daniella held her tongue, Fiona could tell it was a deliberate gesture. Her gaze was scrutinising, searching Fiona’s face for something that she ultimately didn’t find, judging by the reservation of her tone when she spoke again.

“You should sleep, Miss.”

Daniella was prone, stretched out like a barrier, and Fiona had never known her eyelids to feel this heavy. She allowed them to close.

“You won’t hurt me,” Fiona said. Partly certain, partly challenging.

“You want to trust me,” came Daniella’s voice.

The monotony of it was soothing, and the source was right there, but she sounded so far away. The earth was packing itself up into a box, loose yarn winding up for the night, leaving Fiona exposed to the mattress under her and the weak heat pulsing from Daniella.

Daniella’s presence, comforting, within touching distance. It was suddenly exactly what Fiona needed, and the only thing she needed, too.

Slumber embraced her; she sunk into it like a stone, Daniella’s last words for now closing off the waking world.

“We shall see if you can.”


End file.
